Cammy on Geocities April 27, 2020

As I said in yesterday’s post, I only joined Geocities.ws to park the URL for my name in case anyone got the bright idea to register as me on yet another site. Since it was late at night and I needed something spergy to cheer me up, I decided to do it in nostalgiaminer mode again. Returning to the minerteaux well was actually an idea proposed by Caby when I mentioned parking the URL, but I figured I couldn’t just mirror a soon two-year-old site and call it there. Instead, I’d do it live.

A lot of what went into minerteaux went into this, so if you want the details, go read “The Day I Became a Nostalgiaminer”, which I still have archived. I’ll just be expanding on that and the original nostalgiaminer essay here since it’s gotten me thinking of that again.

So back when I made minerteaux, I’d only ever worked with text on solid colors, and textures and backgrounds weren’t much of a consideration. In fact, I think I said people should never use them at one point even, but that’s the contrarian zealot in me talking. Of course, tiled, faded, computer-generated textured backgrounds used to be all the rage, so I needed one for the part, and I happened to have just the program lying around for the task, that being Pegtop’s XFader from…about 2005 or so.

I originally grabbed XFader long ago for generating level textures, only to discover that XFader’s weren’t especially realistic and stuck out horribly. Thus, although they were generally useless for my levels, they were utterly perfect for that ridiculous late 90s webpage look. After proving successful with minerteaux, textures have been a staple of every one of my personal site redesigns ever since.

Admittedly, I still have no idea what the fuck I’m doing with it, but hey, nice. Looks like a riverbed.

Every time I build a nostalgiaminer site, I forgo a stylesheet and use HTML 3.2 explicitly, doctype and all. I figure if I’m building an old site, I want to get as far away from what I normally do as possible. This one was also a table layout, but far subtler than minerteaux. A ton of badger graphics and some doofy gay text later, and I had a pretty damn good parked page, if I do say so myself.

It’s curious to me how my views on nostalgiamining have changed over the past two years. I think my original term was muddied a little by being used to refer to a few different phenomenons at once:

1. The desire to produce an intentionally outdated looking page
2. The same, but without any of the substance that makes those pages fun to browse
3. The fact that Neocities kids rarely produced genuinely old looking pages (you need more than star backgrounds and 88x31s, lads)
4. The use of obsolete HTML like <center> and <font> in an HTML5 document out of laziness (get it right or drink me)
5. Any combination of these

Things really started to shift when I built minerteaux and I realized what my issue was in the first place. It was never “old sites”, even badly put together ones–it was style over substance. I’m a simple guy. Predictable, I’d call myself at times. Overall, I like more doing than talking (and I talk a lot), and given Neocities encouraged the shallow, vacuous march of “updates” through the feed and follower system so kids could stay relevant in a sea of identical sites, well, all they ever do is talk, as the song goes.

The promise of a “nostalgiamined” website isn’t in the GIFs or the backgrounds–it’s in the personality. The way that people threw caution to the wind, making entire shrines to what they adored regardless of its popularity. This is how you connect with someone, and it’s something millennials and zoomers have largely lost in the wake of transitioning to social media. Part of me wants to say they haven’t been trained to be themselves, but what generation ever was themselves? Guarantee you most of the hippies were only doing it because everyone else was.

We’re social creatures, and the modern internet is built to emphasize sociality–and that’s where it loses us. Our personalities don’t necessarily come from the little version of us inside ourselves, curled up and weeping at all our pain, but it does come from what we alone have. When your internet lives and dies on interaction, follows, toeing party lines, watching what everyone else watches, you cease to have a personality and become a mere bugman, a hollow shell quietly avoiding having an incorrect opinion or liking something that’ll get you stared at. No wonder everyone is ~anxious~.

To have a personality is to potentially be rejected by your peers and maybe even ostracized in extreme cases. Having personality alone doesn’t mean you connect to people, granted, you have to be able to communicate it effectively too, but it’s the part you can’t teach. It’s the part that’s innate, the part of us that makes us look at a singer who wrote a line we like and go “no one else could’ve written that line”.

And the modern internet, Neocities included, was built on making sure that never happens again. Maybe personality is just shown in a mutated form an old soul like me can’t understand. Maybe Vine and TikTok compilations are teeming with personality and I don’t see it. I somehow doubt it though.

And yes, I’m sure it’s a ridiculous topic in reference to a landing page of badger photos referring to my girlfriend as my wife, but that’s the beauty of the madness, isn’t it? It’s our purpose and what we see in it that matters, unless you’re some fucking vaporwave postmodernist, in which case you should stop.

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